Links

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2175534-women-have-more-miscarriages-than-live-births-over-their-lifetime/
30 July 2018
Women have more miscarriages than live births over their lifetime


The ravings of nutty QAnon sounds to me like Donald Trump.


https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jul/27/orca-mother-carries-dead-baby-washington-canada
July 27, 2018
A grieving mother orca near Vancouver Island has been carrying her dead calf for four days, after refusing to leave her baby behind when the rest of her pod left.
The calf’s death highlights the larger tragedy facing orcas and the ecosystem they rely on in the Salish Sea, a waterway stretching from south of Seattle to north of Vancouver.
The Center for Whale Research, which monitors the whale population for the American and Canadian governments, reports that three years have passed since an orca residing in the area has birthed a surviving calf. The survival rate in the past two decades has been 75%. Only 75 killer whales in the endangered group, known as southern resident orcas, remain.
The orcas’ decline is linked to the failure of another iconic Pacific north-west species, the Chinook salmon. Like the southern resident orcas, several Chinook stocks are listed under the US Endangered Species Act. Orcas have struggled to feed as stocks have declined.
This month, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists and Washington state fisheries officials announced they had reoriented salmon recovery efforts to save the orcas.


https://www.vox.com/2018/7/31/17635592/facebook-elections-russia-2018-midterms
July 31, 2018
Someone is trying to influence the midterm elections by sowing divisions among Americans on social media, according to Facebook — though the company won’t say it’s necessarily Russia that’s to blame.
On Tuesday, Facebook announced that it had removed more than two dozen pages and accounts from its platform because they were involved in “coordinated inauthentic behavior” in the lead-up to the midterm elections. While it could not explicitly link the suspicious activity to Russia, Facebook said it is “consistent with” what it saw from the Russian troll farm the Internet Research Agency before and after the 2016 presidential election.


https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/trump-s-dhs-chief-kirstjen-nielsen-let-me-be-clear-n896191
July 31, 2018
One of President Donald Trump's top cabinet officials told a gathering of cybersecurity leaders Tuesday that the Russians attacked the 2016 presidential election and that "America will not tolerate this meddling."
"Two years ago, a foreign power launched a brazen, multi-faceted influence campaign ... to distort our presidential election," said Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen during an opening roundtable at the DHS National Cybersecurity Summit in New York. "Let me be clear: Our intelligence community had it right. It was the Russians."
"We know that, they know that. It was directed from the highest levels. And we cannot and will not allow it to happen again."

https://fsapps.nwcg.gov/
July 31, 2018
There are currently more than 100 large wildfires in the U.S., all in the western half


https://www.wired.com/story/how-plastic-straws-slip-through-the-cracks-of-waste-management/
July 26, 2018
How Plastic Straws Slip Through the Cracks of Waste Management
“I think the reason straws have been singled out is because they are a low-hanging fruit. They are something that most of us, though not all, for example some disabled people, children, can easily do without, and by doing so we reduce the amount of plastic trash that is generated and therefore needs to be managed somehow.” Straws may be a small percent of the overall US total—they aren’t even a huge percent of all the small plastic debris that gums up nature’s maw. But a low-hanging fruit is still worth picking.


http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2018/07/how-coalitional-instincts-make-weird.html
July 30, 2018
How Coalitional Instincts Make Weird Groups and Stupid People
"The primary function that drove the evolution of coalitions is the amplification of the power of its members in conflicts with non-members. This function explains a number of otherwise puzzling phenomena. For example, ancestrally, if you had no coalition you were nakedly at the mercy of everyone else, so the instinct to belong to a coalition has urgency, preexisting and superseding any policy-driven basis for membership. This is why group beliefs are free to be so weird.
to earn membership in a group you must send signals that clearly indicate that you differentially support it, compared to rival groups. Hence, optimal weighting of beliefs and communications in the individual mind will make it feel good to think and express content conforming to and flattering to one’s group’s shared beliefs and to attack and misrepresent rival groups. The more biased away from neutral truth, the better the communication functions to affirm coalitional identity, generating polarization in excess of actual policy disagreements. Communications of practical and functional truths are generally useless as differential signals, because any honest person might say them regardless of coalitional loyalty. In contrast, unusual, exaggerated beliefs—such as supernatural beliefs (e.g., god is three persons but also one person), alarmism, conspiracies, or hyperbolic comparisons—are unlikely to be said except as expressive of identity, because there is no external reality to motivate nonmembers to speak absurdities.
Humans want to join coalitional groups, but we can at least consider whether the way a group expresses solidarity is a good fit with who we want to be.

tags: tribes, tribal, tribalism, group
, groupthink